Kennedy Wrong About Torture

By Richard Bell, Daily Kos

Has our country really sunk so low that the best legislative action that the Democratic Senate can come up with is a bill to better define torture?

If such a pathetic response is taken to be the answer to the crisis of executive branch criminality facing our nation, then the cause of freedom in the United States is truly doomed.

That Schumer and Feinstein, senior senators from the Democratic Party, would so eagerly gulp down the lies coming from Bush, Cheney, and Cheney's truly evil advisor David Addington, lies parroted through the feeble lips of Judge Mukasey, beggars the imagination of anyone who cares about freedom.

There's no debate that waterboarding is torture; there's no need to pass any more legislation. Everyone in the world knows, and has known for hundreds of years, that waterboarding is torture.

Because of Feinstein and Schumer's craven betrayal of our country, and their betrayal of the innocent victims of torturers everywhere in the world, the Judiciary Committee of the United States Senate is now on record as accepting torture, as already defined under international law, as the policy of the United States government. And according to all reports, the Democratic-led Senate will soon approve Mukasey. No Senator is even murmuring about a filibuster.

I have never felt more ashamed of my country, or of the party for which I have worked so hard over the years.

Now comes Senator Kennedy with his bill (S.1943)that will, among other things, prohibit the use of waterboarding.

In some other time, in some other place, such a bill might be meaningful. But at this time, in this place, this bill is worse than useless. Debating this bill will only distract the public and the Congress from dealing with the utter lawlessness of this president and his administration.

The United States government has become a criminal enterprise, one that has adopted torture as state policy. If Senator Kennedy wants to lead, he should be calling for the immediate impeachment of both Vice President Cheney and President Bush.

We cannot have a free country in which our elected leaders are willing to torture. Passing laws about what is, and what is not, torture, is too little, too late. Bush and Cheney have shown that they have complete contempt for those of us who believe that our country should be governed by the rule of law.

Bush and Cheney can always have their "lawyers" write them another memo or two, or throw in a signing statement (if the Congress should, through some miracle, pass Kennedy's bill over Bush's veto), and continue on their merry way to the secret prisons of the CIA and the torture dens of rendition countries.

At this juncture, it is too late to write any more laws. No law ever written will restrain the criminals who are now in charge of our government.

It's time for the Senators and Representatives who want to save this nation from tyranny to do one thing, and one thing only: impeach these torturers as soon as possible, and insist that their successors understand that the days of the "unitary executive" are history. Everything else--SCHIP, global warming, Social Security--amounts to nothing if we have lost our freedom and the decent respect of the rest of the world's peoples.